The Unclad Soul

While on the walking/bike trail this morning, Billy Joel’s “The Piano Man,” began playing through my earbuds. This was one of my late brother Jim’s favorite songs. We often talked about it. So, when it started playing, I raised my index finger to the sky and said, “This one is for you, Jim, wherever you are or aren’t.” Death has always been a mystery to me. Eternal life, the idea of immortality after this life, is something I can’t explain or even comprehend. As a minister, I was, over the years, with many people who were dying and, in some instances, who died in my presence. There is a profound change in the body at death, an emptying of life. The human spirit leaves, you can almost see it happening, and disappears into the inscrutable and is gone forever. Where does that spirit go? I’m not certain. As a Christian, I want to believe our essence, our spirit finds rest somewhere beautiful. But, in spite of those classic Bible verses and the long history of Christiani...

There is an insightful comment from the novelist Virginia Woolf in her search for purpose in life. She had often come to detours and dead ends. There were high moments of discovery and low times of nagging self-doubt. In a personal essay she concluded, “What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with the years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.” It is such a magnificent comment. Most of us at some point in our lives, often in mid-life or our later years, look back over it all and wonder what any of it meant. We see people we loved for the wrong reasons. Relationships that ended badly. Pathways we should have never taken. Choices we knew were questionable but made them anyway often with regret. We see good times, laughter and celebrations, deep love; that fun concert, the hila...

I want to run along the ocean and feel the waves wash over my feet erasing my footprints in the sand I want to skydive and sense myself falling watching the landscape below me seeing everything so clearly so cleanly until I love it all more than ever before I want to play guitar in an old bar and sing on a wooden stage with a drink at my feet making music that turns the crowd toward their dreams until all the hurts in the room melt in tears I want to write beautiful lines and put them in a book where the pages burn with longing and the reader sighs and blinks and walks toward a lost love until all of self is whole again I want to stand on a mountain ridge where the sun spreads light on slow moving cattle below where the Alfalfa smells sweet and the sky is a cloudless blue I want to ride a galloping horse in an open field until the air stings my eyes and I hear the pounding of the horse’s hooves and feel that floating that comes when you’re carried by forces beyond y...

It is easy to exaggerate our current gloom. Especially when it plays out in front of us each day across the myriad of media outlets. Things are bad, yes. Our culture is fraught with disdain, disregard, and the dismissal of rules, standards, and traditions. We are a spoiled society, for the most part, lost in our feelings of entitlement and selfishness, our stubborn beliefs and our unwillingness to revere all humanity, even our own. That, of course, is not the whole story. We do have our better moments, our acts of heroism, our generosity, our compassion, our love. There are vast places across this bleeding nation that are filled with decency, neighborliness, kind words, and good deeds. Not everyone is a bully or a liar, a manipulator or abuser. The country is populated with, yes, saints and angels, people of spiritual and emotional depth, thinking people, noble people who lift, who inspire, who instruct the rest of us in a way of life that doesn’t dominate but cultivates. ...

In the wild and violent HBO series, Deadwood, the Reverend H.W. Smith (Raymond McKinnon) seems oddly out of place. In the midst of Gold Rush outlaws and moral misfits, he is a tall, gentle man, with a kind heart. Deadwood is a savagely unmanageable town in the Black Hills of South Dakota. And Reverend Smith, an upright mystic, and a man of the Bible, struggles to extend the goodness of God to the ruthless and the wicked. A smallpox plague strikes the town and “Preacher” Smith works tirelessly to aid the sick and the dying ignoring the risks of contagion. He somehow escapes the plague but then is afflicted with epilepsy and eventually insanity. In his illness, he finds comfort in the piano playing at the Gem Saloon and Brothel. He is seen there hugging his weathered Bible, his eyes glassy and bleak, smiling broadly with his head raised to heaven and his body weaving to the music. The bar owner, the incorrigible Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), tells the preacher he can’t be...

“Outside the freezing desert night, This other night grows warm, kindling.” ~ Rumi

  “When I am among the trees, Especially the willows and the honey locust, Equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, They give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily. I am so distant from the hope of myself, In which I have goodness, and discernment, And never hurry through the world But walk slowly and bow often. Around me the trees stir in their leaves And call out, ‘Stay awhile.’ The light flows from their branches. And they call again, ‘It’s simple,” they say, ‘and you too have come Into this world to do this, to go easy, to be filled With light, and to shine.” ~ Mary Oliver

 “A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”  – Roald Dahl, Novelist

How did we lose the fundamental joy of the human spirit? How did we come to be so distrusting of one another? How did we learn to give in to such appalling responses to our differences? There is a beautiful stanza in one of poet laureate Billy Collins’ poems that says: “It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine.” Today, though, there is this: Hateful, spiteful, ruinous politics. Superficial, sanctimonious, greedy, judgmental religion. U.S. drones that roam the world killing terrorists, yes, but far too many of the innocent. Spying on everyone by our fear soaked, paranoid government. Indifference to poverty, to domestic violence, to abandoned children, to the needs of the old. Making a mockery of our educational system by defunding its deepest budgetary needs. Cops—impulsively mean, brutal and lawless, out of control. Old time bigotry dressed up in patriotic garb. Health care for all ...